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Overview |
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Game of Life |
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TV episodes |
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Overview |
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Star Trek TNG |
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The Trap Door |
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Willo the Wisp |
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OS X Terminal |
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AppleScripts |
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Foxy :-) |
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Pi to 100 |
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Links |
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Useful AppleScripts
AppleScript is a scripting language included in the Mac OS. The Script Editor application (located in /Applications/AppleScript/) allows you to write and execute AppleScript code to perform some very useful tasks. On this page, I’m documenting my favourite uses for AppleScript. When you open a document from a Finder window (by double-clicking it, or selecting it and pressing ⌘O), and then modify it and save it, the Finder usually doesn’t immediately update the “Date Modified” and “Size” columns for that document. This can be rather unhelpful! However, the code below will force the Finder to update these columns in the frontmost window:
I recommend you save this code as an “application” (using Script Editor) and place it in your Dock. Then, whenever you want to force-update the “Date Modified” and “Size” columns in the frontmost Finder window, simply click on your application in the Dock. The code below executes the screencapture Terminal command at regular intervals, to create a time-lapse sequence of screenshot images in PNG format:
Change the 9999 value to specify how many screenshots you want. Change the delay 30 value to specify the time delay between each screenshot in seconds (eg. delay 3600 would take one screenshot every hour). Note: the actual delay between screenshots will be a little bit longer than the delay you specify, since the process of actually taking a screenshot and saving it to disk isn’t instantaneous. See here for my documentation on the screencapture Terminal command. See here for more information about the do shell script AppleScript command. In line 1, the choose folder command returns an alias. In line 2, the POSIX path of the alias is obtained as a string (eg. "/Users/michaelhogg/Desktop/"). In line 3, the POSIX path string is converted into a format called quoted form, which is compatible with the do shell script command. See here for more info. Without this conversion, certain characters (' ( ) $ * etc) in the POSIX path string would cause problems in the do shell script command. Below is an example showing a POSIX path string before and after conversion into quoted form:
When you copy something to the Clipboard (eg. some text from a webpage), the Clipboard actually stores the data in several different formats (eg. plain text, RTF, etc). Once you’ve copied some data to the Clipboard, run the following code to obtain a list of the available data formats:
Text copied from a webpage will produce a list of data formats like this:
The number next to each format indicates the number of bytes of data in that format. In this example, the plain text string only requires 150 bytes, whereas the RTF format requires 1,598 bytes. An image copied from a webpage will produce a list of data formats like this:
Images in the Clipboard are stored in two formats: picture (PICT) and TIFF picture (TIFF). To view the actual data in the Clipboard, run this code:
Replace «class utf8» with the data format that you wish to view. A couple of examples are shown below:
Note that many data formats, such as RTF and images, will be displayed as hex data rather than readable text. To save Clipboard data to a file:
Replace «class utf8» with the data format that you wish to save. This code will prompt the user to choose a location and name for the output file. The file name should end with the appropriate extension (.txt for a plain text file, .rtf for an RTF file, .pict for a PICT image, .tiff for a TIFF image, etc).
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Contact me – Page last updated on 29th January 2009 – Website hosted by 5quidhost (highly recommended!) |  |
